DIY Google AI Assistant Using A Raspberry Pi

Introduction

This article demonstrates how to build and set up Pi-powered Google Assistant, also known as Google Home. This is early adoption of integrating Google Home to the Raspberry Pi.

Google Assistant

Google Home speakers enable the users to give voice commands to interact with services through Google's personal assistant software called Google Assistant.

DIY Google AI Assistant using a Raspberry Pi

Equipment List

Raspberry Pi 2 or 3
Micro SD Card
USB Microphone
Speakers

Step 1

Register and set up a project on the Google Action console. You must have logged into your Google account and you will be greeted with the following screen to create a new project. Here, our project name is Ras-Pi and then, click the "Create" button.

Navigate to the credentials page and enable the Google Assistant API before you go to select the project.

Select OAuth consent screen and create a new application with a name same as the project name.

Click the drop-down button and select the client ID.

After that, select the application type. This is the Linux operating system, so select the "Other" option.

Provide the code for client ID and client secret.

Step 2

Download the JSON file in Raspberry Pi. The download location is "home/pi/Downloads".

Go to the following link https://myaccount.google.com/activitycontrols to enable the voice and audio activity.

Step 3

Open Noobs terminal or Putty. To learn how to connect putty, refer to my article Lightweight Raspberry Pi 3 Web Server Using PHP And HTML and install the latest Python IDE.

sudo apt-get install python3-dev python3-venv

Set up the Python IDE.

python3 -m venv env

Upgrade the Python setup tool and activate.

env/bin/python -m pip install --upgrade pip setuptools --upgrade
source env/bin/activate

Download the following library for Google Assistant.

python -m pip install --upgrade https://github.com/googlesamples/assistant-sdk-python/releases/download/0.3.0/google_assistant_library-0.0.2-py2.py3-none-linux_armv7l.whl

Install the Google Authentication Library tool.

python -m pip install --upgrade google-auth-oauthlib[tool]

Step 4

Obtaining an authentication key, replace the idxxx with your client Id file.

google-oauthlib-tool --client-secrets /home/pi/Downloads/client_secret_client-idxxx.json --scope https://www.googleapis.com/auth/assistant-sdk-prototype --save --headless

Google APIs provide the authorization link. Then, browse the given link to generate the authorization key.

Copy this code and switch to your application and paste.

Enter the authorization code : XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Output

If you ask a question, the Assistant will reply.

See the EventType for details on all events and their arguments.

"What time is it?" -> "The time is 9:02 PM"

"Set a timer" -> "Okay, for how long?" ->

"5 minutes" -> "Sure, 5 minutes, starting now!"

Summary

Finally, we have successfully created a DIY Google AI Assistant using Raspberry Pi.